Drive the narrow road up from Teelin to Bunglass for the view of the cliffs

Walk the Pilgrim Path up from Teelin to the ruins of Aodh Mac Bricne's church and well

Find the remains of the beehive huts on the plateau

Look along the ridge to One Man's Pass, and cross it only if you are an experienced hill walker

At 601 metres, Slieve League has the second-highest sea cliffs in Ireland, after Croaghaun on Achill, and some of the highest in Europe. The classic view is from Bunglass, at the end of a narrow road up from the fishing village of Teelin. On the landward side the Pilgrim Path climbs a U-shaped valley above Teelin to the ruins of the church and well of Aodh Mac Bricne, a 6th-century bishop who is said to have spent his last years as a hermit on the mountain, with the remains of beehive huts around them. Beyond, the ridge narrows to One Man's Pass.

Slieve League: The Cliffs from Bunglass and the Pilgrim Path

Go through the Folk Village cottages, one for each of three centuries

Walk the Turas, or as many of its fifteen stations as you can

Find the holy well at Beefan on the Turas route

Gleann Cholm Cille, on the Atlantic coast of south-west Donegal, is named after St Colm Cille — Columba — one of Ireland's three patron saints, and it is in the Gaeltacht. On 9 June, his feast day, the local people walk the Turas: fifteen stations of cross-slabs, stone crosses, a holy well, a church site and megalithic tombs, beginning at a court cairn built about 3000 BC, each station circled three times sunwise with prayers. The holy well is in the townland of Beefan. Father James McDyer came to the glen in December 1951, when seventy years of emigration had taken about 60 per cent of the parish's people; he set up local industries to stop the decline, and in 1967 opened the Folk Village: thatched cottages furnished as they would have been in the 1700s, 1800s and 1900s, with a schoolhouse, a shebeen and a fisherman's cottage.

Glencolmcille: The Folk Village and Colm Cille's Turas

Book a deep-sea angling charter out of Killybegs harbour, Ireland's largest fishing port, for pollack, mackerel, or cod on the offshore grounds

Fish from the harbour wall or pier rocks for mackerel on light tackle, the standard shore-angling catch in Donegal Bay

Practice catch-and-release on anything undersized or out of season, checking Inland Fisheries Ireland's limits before you fish

If your visit coincides with the annual Killybegs Hooked Seafood Festival, take part in its sea angling event alongside local anglers

Killybegs is Ireland's largest fishing port, home to charter operators running deep-sea angling trips for pollack, mackerel, and cod on the offshore grounds. The harbour also hosts the annual Killybegs Hooked Seafood Festival, which includes a sea angling event alongside its seafood competitions.

Killybegs: Deep-Sea Angling From Ireland's Biggest Port

Drive the hairpins of the Glengesh Pass south out of Ardara

Stop at the top of the pass and look back down the glen

Find a working handweaver in Ardara and watch Donegal tweed being made

Walk Maghera Strand and look into the sea caves under Slievetooey at low tide

Stop at the Assaranca waterfall on the road out to Maghera

Ardara is the weaving town of south-west Donegal, where Donegal tweed is still made by hand, and the road south out of it climbs the Glengesh Pass in a set of hairpins onto empty moorland before dropping away towards Glencolmcille. It is one of the great short drives in Ireland and it takes about ten minutes, which is the joke of it. West of the town, below Slievetooey, Maghera Strand hides more than twenty sea caves that you can only reach when the tide is out, and on the road out to it is the Assaranca waterfall.

Ardara and the Glengesh Pass

Walk in from the main entrance at the Mullyvea gate, opposite Kiltooris Lough

Scan the lough and the machair for Greenland white-fronted geese and whooper swans in winter

Find choughs feeding on the short grass of the machair

Look for marsh fritillaries and the reserve's orchids, including the rare Irish orchid, in the dune grassland and slacks

Walk out to the coastal heath on the headland beyond the dunes

Sheskinmore Nature Reserve lies between Kiltooris and Ballinreavy Strand, north-west of Ardara: a fixed dune system of machair grassland and dune slacks round Sheskinmore Lough, with marsh, fen and reedbed around the lough and coastal heath out on the headland beyond the dunes. In winter it takes Greenland white-fronted geese, whooper swans, lapwing and golden plover, and chough are here all year. Marsh fritillary and dingy skipper both breed on the reserve, and the orchids include marsh helleborine, bee orchid, frog orchid and the rare Irish orchid. Cattle graze it through the winter.

Sheskinmore: Geese, Choughs and Orchids Behind the Dunes

Walk round Mullaghmore Head and watch the Atlantic come in

Look at Classiebawn Castle on the headland and find out who built it

Walk the harbour Palmerston built and Nimmo designed

Find out what happened off this coast in August 1979

Mullaghmore is a village on a headland in north Sligo. The 3rd Viscount Palmerston began Classiebawn Castle on the peninsula and built the stone harbour, to a design by Alexander Nimmo; his agents also oversaw the 'assisted emigration' of tenants during and after the Famine. Classiebawn later became the holiday home of Lord Mountbatten, and it was off this coast in August 1979 that he, his grandson Nicholas Knatchbull, Lady Brabourne and Paul Maxwell, a fifteen-year-old from Enniskillen in County Fermanagh who was working on the boat, were killed by an IRA bomb. Today Mullaghmore is a big-wave surfing spot: on 8 March 2012 surfers rode waves up to 15 metres high off the Head.

Mullaghmore: Big Waves and Classiebawn

Walk into the open oval court and stand in the ceremonial space

Find the burial chambers leading off the far end of the court

Work out what an open forecourt says about how these tombs were used

Look up at Benbulbin and the Dartry Mountains from the tomb

Creevykeel sits right beside the N15 at Cliffony and is one of the finest court tombs left in Ireland — a full oval forecourt open to the sky, with burial chambers leading off it, built around five and a half thousand years ago. The court is the point: these were tombs designed with an open ceremonial space at the entrance, so whatever was done here was done in front of people. It is free, unfenced and takes ten minutes off the road.

Creevykeel: One of Ireland's Finest Court Tombs

Walk among the tombs at Carrowmore and find Listoghil at the centre

Find out how many tombs were destroyed after 1800

Climb Knocknarea to the great cairn of Miosgán Médhbh

Look back from Knocknarea's summit over Carrowmore and Sligo Bay

Carrowmore has 30 surviving megalithic tombs, with another 25 destroyed since 1800, which makes it one of the four great passage-tomb clusters in Ireland with Carrowkeel, Loughcrew and Brú na Bóinne. Most of them are satellite tombs round the largest monument on the high point of the plateau, the restored cairn called Listoghil. To the west the whole landscape is dominated by Knocknarea, with the great cairn of Miosgán Médhbh on its summit — one of the largest cairns in Ireland, by tradition the grave of Queen Medb and believed to hold a Neolithic passage tomb.

Carrowmore and Knocknarea: Medb's Cairn

Find the Romanesque frescoes in Cormac's Chapel, the only ones to survive in Ireland

Look up at the round tower, the oldest building on the Rock

Walk the roofless cathedral and find out who took its roof off in the 1730s

Walk down across the fields to Hore Abbey below the Rock

Brian Boru was crowned on the Rock of Cashel in 977 and made it his capital, and in 1101 the King of Munster, Muirchertach Ua Briain, gave the fortress to the Church. The oldest and tallest building on it is the round tower, 28 metres high, from around 1100. Cormac's Chapel, begun in 1127 and consecrated in 1134, holds the only surviving Romanesque frescoes in Ireland, damaged by the waterlogged sandstone. The cathedral lost its roof in the 1730s on the orders of the Anglican archbishop Arthur Price. Below the rock stands Hore Abbey, given to the Cistercians around 1270 by Archbishop David Mac Cerbaill, who by tradition turned out the Benedictines after dreaming they meant to kill him.